Why I built AndEase

I have been a pain patient for more than 20 years now. In that time, I have learned that pain is not only about the pain itself. It is also about remembering what happened, tracking medication, explaining symptoms, and trying to make sense of patterns over time.

I have lived with chronic pain since I was 21. What started as pain in my left kidney became years of hospital visits, surgeries, infections, strong medication, emergency room visits, and uncertainty.

At first, doctors thought it was a kidney stone. It turned out not to be. The problem was the passage from my kidney to my bladder: there simply was not enough room. I had surgery, and for a while it seemed like that had solved it.

For five years, everything was fine. Then the pain came back.

What followed was a long and difficult period of repeated surgeries and infections. Eventually, after many attempts to fix the issue, we decided to remove my left kidney. The kidney itself was healthy, but the infections and complications had become too much.

I thought that would finally be the end of it. Then I started getting pain in my right kidney.

That was frightening. I was afraid I would have to go through the same thing all over again. Fortunately, the doctors did not find the same problem there. But the pain was still real, and it still affected my life.

I needed painkillers often, and at times the pain was so intense that I had to go to the emergency room for morphine. Doctors would often scan me because they suspected a kidney stone. Funny enough, I do not think I have ever actually had a kidney stone.

Living like that changes things.

I had to drop out of university, because studying, reading, being in pain, and taking strong medication is not a good mix. But I found another way forward. I started a career in IT, and I was lucky to have good managers who understood that some days I simply could not work.

Over the years, the pain kept creating new complications. During one scan, doctors found something on my bladder and removed it. The surgery went well, but six months later, while I was on vacation in Finland, my bladder ruptured. I had emergency surgery there, and a couple of weeks later I returned home to Denmark.

Unfortunately, I then developed an infection that caused one of my testicles to die, and that also had to be removed.

So pain has not been a small chapter in my life. It has shaped my education, my work, my health, my relationship with doctors, and the way I think about everyday life.

One of the most frustrating things about being in pain is how hard it becomes to think clearly.

When I take medication, I usually know roughly how long it should take before it starts working. But when the pain is severe, even simple things become difficult.

Looking at the clock, remembering when I took the pill, and working out when relief might come can feel impossible when your body is screaming at you.

It can also be difficult to keep track of how much medication I have taken. Not just the timing, but the total amount across the day.

When the pain is intense, it is hard to think clearly, calculate doses, or remember whether I already took something earlier. I wanted to avoid taking too much, but I also wanted to avoid taking too little because I had lost track.

I also tried keeping journals.

I wanted to understand my pain better. I wanted to know whether there were patterns. Was something triggering it? Was a medication actually helping? Were some days worse because of sleep, movement, stress, or something else?

But paper journals did not work for me. Excel sheets did not work either. They were too hard to keep updated, especially on bad days, and they never really gave me the insight I was hoping for.

So I looked for an app.

I wanted something simple: an easy way to log pain, medication, timing, relief, and health context. I wanted to see how much medication I had taken, when I had taken it, how it related to my pain level, and whether it seemed to help.

I also wanted my data to be mine.

But the apps I found were either expensive, too complicated, or stored everything in the cloud in a way I was not comfortable with.

So I decided to build my own. That became AndEase.

At first, AndEase was built for me.

I needed a private, simple pain and medication tracker that made it easy to log what was happening in the moment, even when I was in a lot of pain.

I wanted to track pain levels, medication, timing, and relief. I wanted to understand when medication usually started working, how much I had taken, and whether my pain changed over time.

For me, this was never just about tracking pain.

It was about creating a clearer picture of pain, medication, relief, and safety, especially in the moments when pain makes everything harder.

Over time, I added more features: medication schedules, helper medication, treatment tracking, Apple Watch support, HealthKit context, insights, and reporting tools.

The goal was never to replace doctors.

The goal was to make it easier to remember what actually happened, understand patterns over time, and bring better information to appointments.

Because when you live with chronic pain, memory is not always enough.

Later, I showed AndEase to my pain doctor.

He told me something that changed the direction of the project: this was something many of his patients could use.

But for clinics, it would be even more useful if patients could share their data in a structured and consistent way.

So I built AndEase Clinic, a provider portal where patients can choose to share their pain logs, medication history, trends, and reports with their care team.

Clinics get a clearer view of what has happened between appointments, and patients do not have to rely only on memory when trying to explain weeks or months of pain. You can read more about the clinic workflow on the AndEase for clinics page.

We have also added support for clinic-requested assessments. Through our agreement with Oxford University, we can use their pain tests, which are widely recognized as a gold standard.

Clinics can send assessments directly to the patient through AndEase Clinic, and the patient can complete them in the app through a simple interface.

That is how AndEase started.

Not as a business idea on a whiteboard, but as something I needed in my own life.

I built AndEase because I know what it feels like to be in pain and not have a clear record. I know what it feels like to sit in front of a doctor and try to explain a month of symptoms from memory. I know what it feels like to wait for medication to work and not be able to think straight.

I also know how important it is to keep track of medication when pain makes everything blurry.

AndEase exists to make that a little easier.

For patients, it is a way to understand their own pain and medication better.

For clinics, it is a way to get better, more consistent information from patients.

And for me, it is the tool I wish I had when this all started.